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Abstract

In the Solidarity game lucky winners of a lottery can transfer part
of their income to unlucky losers. Will losers get smaller transfers
if they can be assumed to be responsible for their zero income
because they have chosen riskier lotteries? Or will risk-lovers and
risk-averters favor those who made the same risk-choice, leading
to larger transfers within rather than between the risk-groups?
While there is support for both motives in the literature, in an
experiment we find that the effect of holding people responsible for
their actions is overcome by behavior guided by in-group favoritism
based on different levels of risk-taking. This behavior is successfully
described by a variant of the social utility function suggested by
Cappelen et al. (2013).